“He’s not really my type on paper, but I’m gonna put my grafting boots on and crack on anyway, because I refuse to be mugged off again.” A first-time viewer hears a sentence like that in the opening five minutes of an episode and quietly wonders whether subtitles in plain English might be available somewhere. Grafting boots? Type on paper? Mugged off? Nobody in the villa pauses to explain, because in there everyone already speaks the language fluently. The contestants flirt, sulk, betray and reconcile in a dialect that feels half British, half invented, and fully impenetrable to anyone tuning in for the first time.
That dialect is now one of the show’s biggest exports. It has crossed the Atlantic with the American version, jumped onto TikTok captions and group chats, and turned up in the mouths of teenagers in Lagos, Nairobi and London who have never set foot on a sunbed in Mallorca. Decoding it is the difference between watching a season feel like a baffling foreign film and following every betrayal in real time. So here is the working dictionary, sorted by what the words actually do.
Why a dating show grew its own dialect
A villa full of single people, no phones, no clocks and nothing to do but talk about each other for eight weeks is a perfect language laboratory. The format strips away the outside world and forces contestants to narrate their feelings constantly, both to each other and to the camera in the Beach Hut. With that much talking and that little to talk about, shorthand develops fast. A long idea like “she is treating that man with no respect and making a fool of him in front of everyone” compresses into a single word: muggy. Efficient, vivid and a bit cruel, which suits the show perfectly.
Most of the vocabulary started as ordinary British and Irish working-class slang. The producers did not write a glossary. Contestants brought their regional speech into the villa, the cameras amplified it, and certain words stuck because they were useful or funny. Repeat that across a decade of seasons since the reboot in 2015, and you get a living lexicon that each new cast inherits and adds to. Some words even made the leap into the official Collins Dictionary blog’s annual roundups, which is roughly the moment a piece of slang stops being slang and becomes simply English.
The flirting vocabulary
Everything in the villa begins with attraction, so it makes sense that the romance has the richest vocabulary.
Graft and grafting are the cornerstone. To graft is to work hard at winning someone over, putting in visible effort to earn romantic attention. It comes straight from British slang for hard manual labour, and the villa kept the sweat in the meaning. Islanders talk about putting their “grafting boots on” before a recoupling, and a contestant who has fallen out with their partner will announce they need to “get grafting” to win them back. If you are not grafting, you are coasting, and coasting gets you dumped.
Crack on is what you do once the grafting starts to work. It simply means to pursue someone romantically, to get on with it. “I’m gonna crack on with her” is a statement of intent. It carries no shame at all in the villa, even when the person you are cracking on with is already half-attached to someone else, which is where a lot of the drama comes from.
My type on paper is the phrase that launched a thousand impressions. It describes your ideal partner in the abstract, the checklist of looks and traits you would pick if you were ordering a person from a catalogue. The catch, and the show knows it, is that the heart rarely respects the paper. Half the season’s tension lives in the gap between “not my type on paper” and “but I can’t stop thinking about them.”
Bev (sometimes bevvy) rounds out the flirting set. A bev is an attractive person, a catch. The logic the islanders use is almost philosophical: if he is your boyfriend, he is your bev, and if he is not your boyfriend, he is still a bev, just someone else’s. Stick it on someone belongs here too. It means to make a move, to flirt with clear intent. Despite how it sounds, nothing is literally being stuck on anyone. “Are you gonna stick it on her tonight?” is just a friend egging you on to shoot your shot.
The insults and the shade
When attraction curdles, the villa has an equally rich vocabulary for tearing each other down. This is where the show earns its reputation.
Muggy is the heavyweight. To be muggy is to be disrespectful, sly or two-faced toward someone. The related verb is to mug off or get mugged off, which means to be made a fool of, disrespected or deceived. A contestant who watches their partner flirt openly with a new arrival has been mugged off, and the whole villa will say so. The word became so central that an early cast member built a clothing brand around the phrase “muggy,” which tells you how deep it runs in the show’s DNA.
Melt is the gentler insult. A melt is someone who has gone soft, sappy or a bit pathetic, usually because they are so smitten they have lost their backbone. Calling a friend a melt is half mockery, half affection. Calling a rival a melt is pure dismissal.
Snake and snakey describe betrayal. Someone is being snakey when they go behind a friend’s back, act sly, or make a move on a partner that is already coupled up with someone else. It is one of the harshest labels in the villa, because loyalty is the social currency and a snake spends it carelessly. Accusations of being a snake have ended friendships on screen in a single conversation.
Salty is the small-scale version of being upset. If someone is acting a bit off, cold or bitter toward you, they are being salty. It almost never refers to taste in there. And pied, or to get pied off, is the verb for rejection. To pie someone is to dump them, blank them or turn them down, the romantic equivalent of throwing a pie in their face and walking away. Few words in the lexicon sting as cleanly.
The emotional dictionary
Beyond flirting and feuding, the villa has invented surprisingly precise words for the messy middle of falling in and out of love.
